This tutorial begins where Tutorial 6 left off. We’re
continuing the Web-poll application and will focus on customizing Django’s
automatically-generated admin site that we first explored in Tutorial 2.

Where to get help:

If you’re having trouble going through this tutorial, please head over to
the Getting Help section of the FAQ.

By registering the Question model with admin.site.register(Question),
Django was able to construct a default form representation. Often, you’ll want
to customize how the admin form looks and works. You’ll do this by telling
Django the options you want when you register the object.

Let’s see how this works by reordering the fields on the edit form. Replace
the admin.site.register(Question) line with:

Now “Choices” is an available option in the Django admin. The “Add choice” form
looks like this:

In that form, the “Question” field is a select box containing every question in the
database. Django knows that a ForeignKey should be
represented in the admin as a <select> box. In our case, only one question
exists at this point.

Also note the “Add Another” link next to “Question.” Every object with a
ForeignKey relationship to another gets this for free. When you click “Add
Another”, you’ll get a popup window with the “Add question” form. If you add a question
in that window and click “Save”, Django will save the question to the database and
dynamically add it as the selected choice on the “Add choice” form you’re
looking at.

But, really, this is an inefficient way of adding Choice objects to the system.
It’d be better if you could add a bunch of Choices directly when you create the
Question object. Let’s make that happen.

Remove the register() call for the Choice model. Then, edit the Question
registration code to read:

This tells Django: “Choice objects are edited on the Question admin page. By
default, provide enough fields for 3 choices.”

Load the “Add question” page to see how that looks:

It works like this: There are three slots for related Choices – as specified
by extra – and each time you come back to the “Change” page for an
already-created object, you get another three extra slots.

At the end of the three current slots you will find an “Add another Choice”
link. If you click on it, a new slot will be added. If you want to remove the
added slot, you can click on the X to the top right of the added slot. Note
that you can’t remove the original three slots. This image shows an added slot:

One small problem, though. It takes a lot of screen space to display all the
fields for entering related Choice objects. For that reason, Django offers a
tabular way of displaying inline related objects. To use it, change the
ChoiceInline declaration to read:

Now that the Question admin page is looking good, let’s make some tweaks to the
“change list” page – the one that displays all the questions in the system.

Here’s what it looks like at this point:

By default, Django displays the str() of each object. But sometimes it’d be
more helpful if we could display individual fields. To do that, use the
list_display admin option, which is a
tuple of field names to display, as columns, on the change list page for the
object:

You can click on the column headers to sort by those values – except in the
case of the was_published_recently header, because sorting by the output
of an arbitrary method is not supported. Also note that the column header for
was_published_recently is, by default, the name of the method (with
underscores replaced with spaces), and that each line contains the string
representation of the output.

You can improve that by giving that method (in polls/models.py) a few
attributes, as follows:

That adds a search box at the top of the change list. When somebody enters
search terms, Django will search the question_text field. You can use as many
fields as you’d like – although because it uses a LIKE query behind the
scenes, limiting the number of search fields to a reasonable number will make
it easier for your database to do the search.

Create a templates directory in your project directory (the one that
contains manage.py). Templates can live anywhere on your filesystem that
Django can access. (Django runs as whatever user your server runs.) However,
keeping your templates within the project is a good convention to follow.

Open your settings file (mysite/settings.py, remember) and add a
DIRS option in the TEMPLATES setting:

DIRS is a list of filesystem directories to check
when loading Django templates; it’s a search path.

Organizing templates

Just like the static files, we could have all our templates together, in
one big templates directory, and it would work perfectly well. However,
templates that belong to a particular application should be placed in that
application’s template directory (e.g. polls/templates) rather than the
project’s (templates). We’ll discuss in more detail in the
reusable apps tutorialwhy we do this.

Now create a directory called admin inside templates, and copy the
template admin/base_site.html from within the default Django admin
template directory in the source code of Django itself
(django/contrib/admin/templates) into that directory.

Where are the Django source files?

If you have difficulty finding where the Django source files are located
on your system, run the following command:

$ python -c "import django; print(django.__path__)"

Then, edit the file and replace
{{site_header|default:_('Djangoadministration')}} (including the curly
braces) with your own site’s name as you see fit. You should end up with
a section of code like:

We use this approach to teach you how to override templates. In an actual
project, you would probably use
the django.contrib.admin.AdminSite.site_header attribute to more easily
make this particular customization.

This template file contains lots of text like {%blockbranding%}
and {{title}}. The {% and {{ tags are part of Django’s
template language. When Django renders admin/base_site.html, this
template language will be evaluated to produce the final HTML page, just like
we saw in Tutorial 3.

Note that any of Django’s default admin templates can be overridden. To
override a template, do the same thing you did with base_site.html – copy
it from the default directory into your custom directory, and make changes.

Astute readers will ask: But if DIRS was empty by
default, how was Django finding the default admin templates? The answer is
that, since APP_DIRS is set to True,
Django automatically looks for a templates/ subdirectory within each
application package, for use as a fallback (don’t forget that
django.contrib.admin is an application).

Our poll application is not very complex and doesn’t need custom admin
templates. But if it grew more sophisticated and required modification of
Django’s standard admin templates for some of its functionality, it would be
more sensible to modify the application’s templates, rather than those in the
project. That way, you could include the polls application in any new project
and be assured that it would find the custom templates it needed.

On a similar note, you might want to customize the look and feel of the Django
admin index page.

By default, it displays all the apps in INSTALLED_APPS that have been
registered with the admin application, in alphabetical order. You may want to
make significant changes to the layout. After all, the index is probably the
most important page of the admin, and it should be easy to use.

The template to customize is admin/index.html. (Do the same as with
admin/base_site.html in the previous section – copy it from the default
directory to your custom template directory). Edit the file, and you’ll see it
uses a template variable called app_list. That variable contains every
installed Django app. Instead of using that, you can hard-code links to
object-specific admin pages in whatever way you think is best.